


Pentacles and Swords

by palmtreelights



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers R.P.M.
Genre: F/F, Flirting, Post-Series, Pre-Relationship, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 17:23:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4313805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmtreelights/pseuds/palmtreelights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little conversation, a little divination, and the beginnings of something new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pentacles and Swords

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Griddlebone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griddlebone/gifts).



Colonel Truman doesn’t want to let Tenaya leave Corinth City.

It’s not because she’s a hybrid—that’d be hypocritical, given Vasquez turned out to be one. It’s not because he thinks the virus isn’t really cured—he’s seen Dr. K administer the antidote to his immediate subordinates, and he’s read the post-infusion scan results on each of them, and he’s found them to be satisfactory. It’s not that he’s afraid she’ll betray them all—well, maybe he still doesn’t trust her, but she doesn’t blame him for that.

The big reason is that he believes she has intel on the location of Venjix’s troops and factories throughout the wasteland, and that this information is vital to the recovery effort.

Luckily for Tenaya, he can’t see her until at least the end of the week because he’s much too busy with organizing the universe of teams that need to be sent out and action plans that must be executed to clean up the dome. All those best-case scenario documents that no one ever thought they’d use are seeing the light of day for the first time since their creation, which leaves Tenaya with too much free time on her hands. She supposes she should use it to see if she actually does possess the knowledge Colonel Truman thinks she does, though she’s almost certain she doesn’t.

Instead, after Dr. K runs a few daily tests on her, she hangs out in the Garage with whoever has decided they need a break from being a hero. Even now, when their mission has effectively been terminated, the Rangers go out of their way to give Corinth their best.

Today, Tenaya walks into the TV room to find Summer leaning over the coffee table, staring intently at some playing cards spread out before her. She likes talking to Summer, likes the steady peace that she exudes. In a place where there are so many things and people to learn, Summer is safety and calm.

“What are you playing?” Tenaya asks her, slowing her pace as she approaches the couch.

“Hm?” Summer glances up at her and shakes her head, as if coming out of a trance. “Nothing.” She reaches over and picks up the three cards in front of her, sliding them into a deck at the far end of the coffee table. “I’m just…” Shrugging, she sighs. “Nothing,” she repeats, and shoots Tenaya a smile as she picks up the deck. “How are you today?”

“Not bad,” Tenaya answers with a shrug. “The tests all came back okay.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.” There isn’t much that could go wrong with her, really. Tenaya may be Venjix-free, but she’s still part machine. Her body will be less susceptible to illness and exhaustion than a normal human one for as long as it holds out. That, she thinks, is what Dr. K is trying to determine: what being a hybrid will mean long-term, without Venjix to sustain and repair her.

But she’s not going to dwell on the fact that the thing that almost wiped out the whole world is the only reason she’s even alive.

“Those cards,” she says instead, nodding at the deck in Summer’s hands. “They’re not the same kind we used to play poker the other night.”

Shaking her head, Summer starts to shuffle them, cutting the deck in half and mixing them together without bending them. “They’re tarot cards. I made my parents buy them for me when I was twelve.”

“Tarot cards,” Tenaya repeats. Something about them sounds familiar, but she can’t bring it to mind. It’s certainly not something she heard of when she was living in Venjix’s palace, so it must be from before.

As if she senses this, Summer tells her, “They’re a little different from playing cards. Most people use these to get insight on a situation. Some people can even tell the future with them.”

“Can _you_?”

Summer chuckles. “No. I wish I could.”

“So… what kind of insight can a deck of cards give you?” Tenaya is curious more than disdainful, her frown directed towards the cards.

“All sorts. I’ll show you.” Summer stops shuffling, splits the deck in two, and places the upper half beneath the lower. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how our lives are changing now that the war is over. So I’m asking the cards to show me a snapshot of what’s on its way out, what’s here right now, and what’s coming soon.”

As she states the three items she’s seeking, she takes a card off the new top of the deck and sets it face down on the coffee table, from left to right. The backs are pretty, Tenaya notices, with a stylized sun and crescent moon sharing one perfect circle, and a star on either side of the sun-moon center design.

Summer flips them over one by one, stating under her breath, “Past, present, future,” as if Tenaya won’t hear her, won’t notice the pleading undertone to her voice.

“I thought you said you couldn’t tell the future with them,” Tenaya remarks.

“I can’t,” Summer agrees, “but I can get a general sense of what’s building, what’s coming if I keep doing what I’m doing now.”

“Like a simulation?”

“Sort of. Actually, I’d never thought of it like that.” She gives Tenaya a grin that fills her eyes, then turns to the cards. Almost as soon as she’s glanced at them, her smile fades around the edges.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Summer answers. “It’s just not as cheerful as I’d hoped for.”

Tenaya peers at the cards. The Sun, the Queen of Pentacles, and the Hanged Man.

“Ouch,” she hisses, taking in the picture of the man hanging upside down from a bridge by a rope tied around his feet. “Don’t go help with repairs on the dome.”

Summer snickers and shakes her head. “It’s not about danger,” she states. “It means I’ll need to go with the flow, stop fighting, look at things from a different angle.”

Upside-down certainly qualifies as a different angle, but it looks uncomfortable. Tenaya remembers Venjix’s crane pulling her up from the lab where they’d worked on her, placing her gently on the ground to begin her mission of destroying the last human city.

She shudders.

“What do the other two mean?”

Setting aside the deck, Summer points to the Sun card, in which friends or family are having a joyous picnic beneath a cloudless sky where the sun shines brightly. “Clarity, a feeling of happiness or lightness. I like to think of it as the sun coming out from behind the clouds after a storm.”

“The end of the war,” says Tenaya, meeting Summer’s gaze.

Summer nods, smiling. “I think that’s what it means here, too.”

Tenaya’s cheeks grow warm under the bright glow of Summer’s smile. She looks down at the cards again, filing this feeling away to process later. Being a normal human is still strange to her. All these thoughts and sensations she’s able to experience now that the virus isn’t messing with her brain are so—foreign. There’s no guidebook for them, either, not that she’s aware of, but surely one of the Rangers will help. They’re all she has in this world, and if there’s one thing she’s sure of about humans, it’s that when they’ve formed bonds with one another, they’re always willing to help each other out.

“What about the Queen of Pentacles?” she asks, forcing herself not to look at Summer as she responds to Tenaya’s question.

“Sometimes she represents a person, someone nurturing and dependable. They can be any gender, really. There’s some history to the cards, about gender, but that’s another story.”

“Who do you think the person is?”

Summer is silent for a while, and Tenaya has to look at her, has to watch her process the thought with furrowed brow and narrowed eyes.

“I’m not sure,” she admits a few seconds later, her voice soft.

“I think it’s you.”

“Really?”

Tenaya looks away from Summer’s eyes as that same warmth from earlier starts to crawl up her neck. “Yeah. In the few days I’ve been here, I can tell you’re the most grounded, relaxed person on the team. Flynn’s pretty relaxed, yeah, but I don’t know that he’s as grounded as you are.”

“I won’t tell him you said that,” says Summer, laughing. “I’m flattered that you think that, though.”

Shrugging, Tenaya reaches for the card in question. The woman in the picture looks nothing like Summer, but the what she represents sounds just like her. “So does this mean you’ll have to stop being everyone’s rock for a while?”

“Maybe.” Summer picks up the other cards and sticks them in the deck, but she doesn’t reach for the one Tenaya is holding. “We’ll see. It’s a nicer reading than the one I did when you walked in, at any rate.”

Handing the card back to Summer, Tenaya gives her half a smile. “I must be a good influence.”

As she puts the card back with the others, Summer narrows her eyes at her. “I’d say you’re a Page of Swords. Fearless and honest, almost like a kid is. Or the Knight of Swords, with all that energy, all that power to fight your fights.”

Tenaya snickers. “I never did beat you guys,” she remarks.

“Five against one wasn’t exactly fair. Or seven against one.”

“You think that’s why I still make people nervous?” Even Colonel Truman, but she doesn’t add that. Summer is smart enough to understand without being told.

“Maybe,” Summer admits, shrugging. “But considering half the people in the city are hybrids, too, I think it’s less about you specifically and more about everyone adjusting to the truth.”

They sit in silence for a moment, thinking back to what used to be, until a thought occurs to Tenaya, and she frowns.

“You must think about me a lot if you could assign me a tarot card after only knowing me for about a week,” she tells Summer, her smile turning the slightest bit mischievous, like when she’d gloated before a fight.

Shrugging, successfully fighting back a grin, Summer sets the deck back on the coffee table. “I could say the same for you, and you don’t even know me _or_ the cards that well.”

“I’d like to,” says Tenaya, before she can stop herself. She doesn’t regret it.

Summer smirks at her, her eyes bright and clear. “Me or the cards?”

“How about both?”

“Okay,” says Summer, a chuckle following right on the edge of the word. She goes for the cards, leaning closer to Tenaya than she needs to on her way to grab them off the table. “Let’s get started.”

Nodding, her smile turning a little more smug, Tenaya reaches for a card.

**Author's Note:**

> Legit performed the tarot reading in this fic. It's one way I practice. Full disclosure, I'm a tarot n00b, and probably am off about the nuances of Page vs Knight. However, I'm more confident about the Sun, Queen of Pentacles, and Hanged Man, and I'm happy that my deck played along for this!


End file.
